40 years ago, Colin Turnbull gained widespread recognition as the author of
“The Mountain People,” an eye-opening book about a little-known tribe living in
a remote region of Northern Uganda near the country’s border with Kenya. His
damning ethnological study indicted the Ik as selfish, loveless, sadistic
monsters who bred indiscriminately, never sang, deserted their elders, laughed
at each other’s misfortunes, and even fed their offspring to wild animals.

Because Turnbull was the only Westerner who had studied these
ostensibly-depraved natives in depth, no one was really in a position to
question the veracity of the British anthropologist’s shocking findings. At
least, until recently, when Cevin Soling decided to conduct his own research
to determine whether the horrifying accounts of barbarism he had read in the
7th grade were really accurate.

So, he assembled an intrepid film crew before embarking on a perilous
trek across some very dangerous terrain marked by civil war and inaccessible
by automobile in search of the selfsame natives Turnbull had dubbed the
worst people in the world. The upshot of that herculean effort is Ikland, a
redemptive documentary which sets the record straight about the
much-maligned tribe.

For, as it turns out, lo and behold, the Ik are a civilized and
perfectly-polite clan, who love their neighbors, the elderly, as well as
their young, judging by all the suckling babes being fed by bare-breasted,
pipe-smoking women in front of huts. Soling, who not only directed but
narrates the film, also interviews a few village elders about what they
remember of the visit decades ago by a Brit detractor who might have had an
agenda.

Because the Ik are so normal, what makes the picture fascinating is the
filmmaker’s taxing ordeal trying to reach them. The ending soon after his
arrival is almost anticlimactic, since the subjects are fairly ordinary
folks, judging by African standards.

A caravan to the middle of nowhere proving it’s still the same all over,
good people everywhere you go.